where the past is always present

Frida’s First Bad Accident

“The Bus,” by Frida Kahlo (1929). Frida painted her recollection of the last moments aboard the bus before the terrible accident that robbed her of her health. She is pictured on the far right. Notice that she is not dressed in traditional Mexican costume. She adopts that exotic look later, after her 1929 marriage to flamboyant Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) once said that she suffered two bad accidents in her life. The first one occurred on September 17, 1925. It would transform her life forever. Frida was only 18.

It was a gray day. A light rain had just fallen. After spending the afternoon wandering among the street stalls of downtown Mexico City, Frida and her boyfriend Alex Gómez Arias caught a bus that would take them home to Coyoacán. The new bus was brightly painted with two benches along the sides. It was nearly full but Alex and Frida found seats together near the back. The bus driver sped off to cross the busy streets on his way out of town.

As the bus driver began to turn onto Calzada de Tlapan, a street trolley approached. The bus driver rashly tried to pass in front of the turning streetcar. He didn’t make it. Alex remembers the point of impact:

The electric train [streetcar] with two cars approached the bus slowly. It hit the bus in the middle. Slowly the train pushed the bus. The bus had a strange elasticity. It bent more and more, but for a time it did not break. It was a bus with long benches on either side. I remember that at one moment my knees touched the knees of the person sitting opposite me. I was sitting next to Frida. When the bus reached its maximal flexibility it burst into a thousand pieces, and the train kept moving. It ran over many people.

I remained under the train. Not Frida. But among the iron rods of the train, the handrail broke and went through Frida from one side to the other at the level of the pelvis.”

Frida said that the “handrail pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull.” Alex continues:

When I was able to stand up, I got out from under the train. I had no lesions, only contusions. Naturally the first thing that I did was to look for Frida.

Something strange had happened. Frida was totally nude. The collision had unfastened her clothes. Someone in the bus, probably a house painter, had been carrying a packet of powdered gold. This package broke, and the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida. When people saw her, they cried, ‘La bailarina, la bailarina!’ With the gold on her red, bloody body, they thought she was a dancer.

I picked her up….and then I noticed with horror that Frida had a piece of iron in her body. A man said, ‘We have to take it out!’ He put his knee on Frida’s body and said, ‘Let’s take it out.’ When he pulled it out, Frida screamed so loud that when the ambulance from the Red Cross arrived, her screaming was louder than the siren. Before the ambulance came, I picked up Frida and put her in the display window of a billiard room. I took off my coat and put it over her. I thought she was going to die. Two or three people did die at the scene….others died later.”

Frida’s condition was so grave doctors didn’t believe they could save her. They thought she would die on the operating table. Her spinal column was broken in three places in the lumbar region. Her collarbone was broken and her third and fourth ribs. Her right leg had eleven fractures and her right foot was dislocated and crushed. Her left shoulder was out of joint, her pelvis broken in three places. The steel handrail produced a deep abdominal wound, entering through the left hip and exiting through the genitals. She convalesced for two years though she would never fully recover.

It was while she was confined to bed that Frida began to paint, using a small lap easel her mother bought for her. Frida had a mirror hung overhead in the canopy of her bed so she could use her reflection as a beginning subject for portraits.

could you tell me the name of the movie i really need it so i can have and idea about frida im only new to it and i have an exam about her on monday i really need to study and im struggling … dont really have much on what i need from other sites and what not

um, so was frida empaled? did it go in then out the other side? and um, also, what was she like? her personality, i mean… oh, and, like, was there another, um, accident? ’cause, like, it says frida kahlos first bad accident…
bye bye
thank you

Wow. I am doing a biography on Frida and this took up about three of my five required parragraphs. Thank you sooo much! PLease think about writing about Vincent Van Goh if you haven’t already. He is the next man I will be writing about.

I am doing a report on Frida Kahlo for a middle school art class and I was wondering about her early childhood. I read somewhere that her parents were to involved with the newest baby so she had to be breastfed by a hired maid or something like that. Is this true, and if it is, could you give me more details about her child hood?

would you be able too give me abit of information on frida im doing a exam at school and its about her and im struggling …
dont really know much about her and ive been looking everywhere
…….ive tried a few sites but hasnt given me what i needed

You may have written this elsewhere, but Frida was a polio victim/survivor before the bus and tram accident, and already lame. Post-polio and sequelae of the accident combined to contribute to her deteriorating health in middle age.

[…] grew out of her experience as a woman with a disability. She survived childhood polio, and was severely injured in a bus accident as a young woman. She endured numerous surgeries, wore painful and restrictive braces for months at […]

[…] think everyone or the majority of the people know Frida’s story or at the least, the horrible bus accident she was in at the age of 18, this was to be the first of her many injuries, physical and mental of […]

[…] warm body temperature, making them comforting to those suffering pain, which Kahlo did after a near-fatal bus crash that severed her spinal column in three places and smashed her collarbone, leg, two ribs and […]

what a compliment! I just had a bad accident, coincidentally, and am in home recovery. May i direct you to the resources on Frida that I cite in my posts? Thank you for understanding, Michelle. I have a broken arm, to start off with!

What sources did you use for the quotes from Alex? I am doing a research paper on Frida written in Spanish and would like to use the original Spanish versions to get the visuals that those quotes give.

Hi Lisa, I am doing a project on Frida’s accident and I was wondering if you could maybe tell me what source you used for Alex Gomez Arias’ words.
This was so helpful, but I really need the original source.

Lisa, this is great info. My sister and I were reading a book about Marie Curie and we were looking at other books in the series and we discovered Frida Kahlo. All it said was that she had a traumatic accident and I wanted to know more. I was wondering if you could do a post like this again on Henry the Eighth, if you haven’t already. Thank you soooo much😀 Also, could you please tell me how old she was when she died? I don’t know if you wrote it in your passage because I was only scimming the words. Thank you.
From Evie

Henry VIII is very interesting. I am an Episcopalian, which means I am an American Anglican, or a member of the Church of England. King Henry started the Church of England so that he could obtain a divorce denied him in the Catholic Church. Check him out in wikipedia.